The views published here are of an ecosocialist nature and from the broad red, green and black political spectrum. The opinions expressed are the personal opinions of the writers and are not necessarily the view of any political parties or groupings that they belong to. Please feel free to comment on the posts here. If you would like to contact us directly, you can email us at mike.shaughnessy@btinternet.com. Follow the blog on Twitter @MikeShaugh

Friday, 31 August 2018

Throughout my political lifetime, the term ‘entryism’ has
only ever been applied in relation to the Labour party being infiltrated by
far-left organisations and individuals. In the 1970s and 1980s there were
constant media stories about groups such as the Communist party and Militant
Tendency taking over the Labour party. Which led to, particularly with
Militant Tendency, so called ‘witch hunts’ and mass expulsions from Labour.

The familiar narrative has of course been played out
recently with an influx of new members to the Labour party leading, in part anyway,
to Jeremy Corbyn winning the leadership of the party, twice.

Faceless individuals were said to be ‘organising and
exploiting’ naïve new, younger members for the purposes of pushing Labour to the
‘far-left.’ The truth of the matter is that these younger members were sick of
the Tweedle Dum, Tweedle Dee routine of the Tories and new Labour, and wanted a
more radical and fairer politics, from the Labour party especially. Corbyn
represented an opportunity to achieve this aim.

This battle rages on in Labour, as the right-wing comes up
with more ways of smearing Corbyn, the latest being the summer long campaign of
anti-Semitism accusations. Out of the media spotlight though, an organised move
to infiltrate the Tory party has been taking place. Encouraged by people like
Aaron Banks, the multi-millionaire who previously bankrolled UKIP and its
Leave.EU campaign group, ex UKIP members and assorted right-wing racists and
Brexit fanatics have joined the Tories. Banks himself has apparently been
refused membership by the Tory party.

Thursday’s London Evening
Standard reveals that it ‘spoke to a number of Tory MPs who admitted that
over the summer the memberships of local parties have increased by double
figures. One in a South East constituency said membership had increased by
about 30 members this summer. Another in the North said they had seen 20 to 30
people join.’

‘One Remain-backing MP said their membership has increased
over the summer by double figures to over 200, and from meetings with their
association executive they know that some people who have joined are hard Brexit
entryists.’

Under Tory party rules you need to have been a member for at
least three months to be eligible to vote, and with a strong possibility that
there will be a leadership challenge to the prime minister, Theresa May, in the
autumn, this may have been a well timed tactic. Recent reports, although the
Tories have been unwilling to release figures, suggested that membership had
fallen to under 100,000, perhaps as low as 75,000.

Which means that only a fraction of the membership surge
that followed Corbyn’s candidature for the Labour leadership, could tip the
Tories into alt-right mode. Existing Tory members were already moving in this
direction in any case so it really wouldn’t take much to complete the process.

We have seen something similar in the US Republican party,
with first the ‘tea party’ faction and then Donald Trump’s winning of the
Republican nomination for president, and subsequent US presidency. Mainstream
Republicans are being pushed to the margins as the combination of small
government libertarians, the Christian right and racist organisations like the
Ku Klux Klan, has captured the party.

The problem for Conservatives is, in many ways, that
Conservatism is difficult to define, and varies from one country to another. As
Paul
Goodman puts it in a thoughtful piece for Conservative Home, the problem is
that ‘a socialist in one country will share an ideology with one in another. By
contrast, conservatism differs hugely even between neighbours. A British and
French Conservative are very different animals.’

With the UK Tories, even their pro-business ideology appears
to be waning, and the old ‘one nation’ Tories are becoming an engendered
species these days in the party. All that remains is a nasty patriotism and
xenophobia, again as Goodman says, ‘the Conservative Party’s main problem isn’t
being infiltrated by the wrong members. It is having too few of the right ones
in the first place.’

The only people attracted to joining the Tories these days
are exclusively from the far-right of the political spectrum.

Wednesday, 29 August 2018

Nigel Farage, the ex-UKIP leader, has been warning ever
since the 2016 referendum that civil unrest would result from the failure of
the British government to fulfil his particular version of (hard) Brexit. In
2017, he
went further saying he would "don khaki, pick up a rifle and head for
the front lines."

More recently, Labour front bench MPs appear to be echoing
Farage’s threat, with both Barry Gardner (shadow International Trade secretary)
and John McDonnell (shadow Chancellor), opining on the issue, with Gardner
predicting:

"If people want to be able to achieve change through
democratic means, if they feel that that is being denied to them, they then
turn to other more socially disruptive ways of expressing their views, and that
is the danger here."

McDonnell added “we have to be extremely careful. A number
of us now are worried about the rise of the far right in this country and
elsewhere," when commenting on the possibility of another referendum on
Brexit. Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary has been more positive about
holding another referendum though.

Tory MP, Priti Patel went further writing
on the Conservative Home website, that the prime minister’s Chequers
compromise plan, would lead to people seeking “alternative ways to express
their views and frustrations with those who have the privilege of governing our
country.” She, like McDonnell, linked Brexit to the rise of the far right in
Europe, although there doesn’t appear to be a clamour to leave the European
Union in the rest of the bloc.

It is a possibility that some people might feel justified in
causing trouble, including violence, if they perceive their wishes are being
ignored. On the other hand, there is just as much chance, even more so, I think,
that a disastrously chaotic exit, which people like Patel want, with shortages
of medicines, food and other things, could lead to widespread civil unrest. Either
way, we should plan for civil unrest.

As always with the Brexit debate, there are reflections on
the other side of the Atlantic. US President, Donald Trump, has warned that his
policies will be "violently" overturned if the Democrats win
November's mid-term elections. He told Evangelical leaders that the vote was a
"referendum" on freedom of speech and religion, and that these were
threatened by "violent people,” meaning anti-fascist protesters, like when
Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville last year, by a far right supporter
driving his car into the crowd.

You have to admire the chutzpah, at least, of a Republican
president, accusing the Democrats of frustrating the will of the voters, after
all the trouble Republicans gave Barak Obama over his health care proposals,
and even further back to the ‘gridlock’ in Congress of Bill Clinton’s Democrat
presidency. And, lest we forget, Hillary Clinton, got 3 million more votes than
Trump at the presidential elections of 2016.

It appears that democracy only comes into things when
certain votes have gone your way in the past. Clearly, more self-seeking than
noble intention. The mid-term Congressional elections in the US are just part
of that country’s democratic checks and balances, existing for centuries, just
like the presidential electoral college system, which handed victory to Trump
in 2016.

Likewise, in the UK, as ex-foreign secretary David Miliband
has said, and I hasten to say I’m not a fan of Miliband senior, by any stretch
of the imagination, when
he wrote in The Guardian that “democracy did not end on 23 June 2016.” If
the Leavers are so confident that they represent the ‘people’s will,’ why are
they so afraid of reconfirming this important decision?

There is another possibility, that a sensible compromise can
be reached, but the Chequers plan is not it. I have argued
before that joining the European Economic Area, perhaps for a temporary
period, is the most sensible thing to do, outside of another referendum. Sensible,
doesn’t come into it though, for some people.

Sunday, 26 August 2018

The Guardian
recently published an opinion piece by its economics editor in which he argued
that capitalism can rescue civilization from the global climate emergency. Here
is the full article, interrupted by my responses:

The struggle to combat climate change
brings out the best and worst of capitalism. Decarbonisation of the economy
requires alternatives for coal and cars that run on diesel, and that plays to
capitalism’s strengths. Innovation is what capitalism is all about, and there
has been staggeringly rapid progress in developing clean alternatives to coal,
oil and gas.

The cost of producing solar- and wind-powered electricity has
collapsed. Great advances are also being made in battery technology, which is
vital for the new generation of electricity-powered vehicles. . . .

This is an
often-heard argument: that capitalist economies are going to prevent climate
catastrophe because “green” technologies are becoming cheaper thanks to
innovation. But all this innovation we’re seeing has only one goal, and that’s
to generate profits. And while capitalist economies are able to spin off
improved renewable-energy systems or energy-efficient technologies, they’re
even better at producing new energy-consuming technologies and products—and
those are getting cheaper, too.

Furthermore,
those analyses purporting to show that 100 percent of current and growing
energy demand can someday be satisfied with renewable sources are based on bad
assumptions and flawed models, but even if the “100%” vision were
achievable, it would leave
stranded billions of people around the world who already suffer energy
poverty. Back to Elliott:

Humans are endlessly creative. In the
end, they will crack climate change. But by the time they do, it could be too
late. Capitalism – especially the dominant Anglo-Saxon variant of capitalism –
has trouble thinking beyond the here and now. People running big corporations see
their job as maximising profits in the short term, even if that means causing
irreparable damage to the world’s ecosystem. What’s more, they think they
should be free to get on with maximising profits without any interference from
politicians, even though the fight against climate change can [only be won
only] if governments show leadership, individually and collectively.

People
running big corporations—indeed, those running businesses of all sizes—seek to
maximize profits not because they are misguided, but because that’s their job
in a capitalist economy. The common goal of both the private and public sectors
is rapid, sustained GDP growth, so the only climate actions that companies or
governments are willing to take are those that will not risk slowing wealth
accumulation. (When Elliott says capitalism must take risks, he doesn’t mean
that kind of risk!) This is why no governments have yet taken the actions that
will be necessary to steeply reduce carbon emissions.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter talked
about the process known as “creative destruction” – the way in which
inefficient producers are put out of business by disruptive new technologies
and that, as a result, transformation happens. During wars, the best brains are
employed by governments to produce more efficient killing machines.

But normally creative destruction
takes time, especially if the old guard can marshall sufficient resistance to
change – something the fossil fuel industry has been adept at doing.

It is
vital that capitalism’s Dr Jekyll emerges victorious over its Mr Hyde. More
than that, it needs to be an immediate knockout blow.

Whoa, there’s
a lot going on here. He seems to be recognizing that disruption can have both
desirable and undesirable results (although it’s not clear to me on which side
of the ledger he puts those efficient killing machines.) We often see it argued
or implied in the mainstream climate movement that if only we could take down
the fossil-fuel companies, the pipeline builders, and the armament makers, the way
would then be clear for the good side of the business world, the Jekylls, to
lead us into a green future. But the only direction the Jekylls plan to lead
society is toward whatever generates the most profit, whether or not it’s good
for the climate (and it’s usually not).

In the past, politicians have [only
tended to focus only] on climate change when they think there is nothing else
to worry about. Tony Blair, for example, commissioned a report from
the economist Nick Stern into climate change during the years before the
global financial crisis, when growth was strong and wages were rising. Margaret
Thatcher only started to talk publicly about protecting the environment when
the economy was booming at the end of the 1980s.

That is an
interesting observation that warrants further discussion.

When policymakers have other things to
worry about, tackling climate change drops down the list of things to do. The Paris
agreement in 2015, which committed the international community to
restricting global warming to well below two degrees centigrade, shows that the
issue is taken more seriously than it was two or three decades ago, but that
doesn’t mean that it is a top priority.

The Paris
Agreement contains no commitments that would reduce warming to 2 degrees, only wishful
thinking. And even a 2-degree increase would
be catastrophic.

When times are tough, politicians are
suckers for the argument that there is a trade-off between growth and greening
the economy. There isn’t. Companies account for capital depreciation when they
draw up their profit and loss accounts. If governments adopted the same
principle and accounted for the depletion of natural capital when drawing up
their national accounts, growth would be lower. In countries such as China and India – where the
cities are dangerously polluted – it would be markedly lower.

Here we come
to a myth that lies at the core of this essay: the notion of “natural capital.”
The great ecological economist Herman
Daly has debunked that myth, for example, when he responded to this
statement by Dieter Helm, chair of the UK Natural Capital Committee: “. . .
[T]he environment is part of the economy and needs to be properly integrated
into it so that growth opportunities will not be missed.” Daly wrote, “If the
Chairman of the UK Natural Capital Committee gets it exactly backwards, then
probably others do too. The environment, the finite ecosphere, is the Whole and
the economic subsystem is a Part—a completely dependent part. It is the economy
that needs to be properly integrated into the ecosphere so that its limits on
the growth of the subsystem will not be missed. Given this fundamental
misconception, it is not hard to understand how other errors follow, and how
some economists, imagining that the ecosphere is part of the economy, get
confused about valuation of natural capital.”

India and
China, already plagued by chronic power outages, are aiming to satisfy rapidly
growing energy demand in the coming decades. In India, energy demand for
buildings alone is projected to almost triple by 2050 (with a huge share going
for air conditioning), while it will rise by 75% in China, which already has
the highest energy consumption by buildings in the world. All of that new
renewable energy capacity being built in the two nations will supplement, not
replace, fossil and nuclear capacity. Emissions will continue.

But the bad news is that progress
towards decarbonisation is still not fast enough. As things stand, fossil fuels
will still account for more than 50% of energy consumption by 2050. CO2
emissions will carry on rising and global warming will continue.

Stern says technological progress has
been much faster than he thought possible when his report was published in
2006, and he thinks it is quite something that all the major car-makers now
accept that the era of the internal combustion engine is coming to an end. “But
the speed of action is still far too slow,” Stern warns. “Emissions have to be
peaking now and turn down very sharply. We have not yet acted on the scale
needed, even though the ingredients are there.”

Stern is
right that emissions have to be reduced “very sharply,” but for that to happen,
there will have to be an immediate, declining cap on the quantities of fossil
fuels being extracted and burned, years
before we have enough renewable capacity to substitute significantly for
fossil energy. That will mean a steep decline in society’s overall energy
consumption, and an even steeper decline in production of consumer goods and
services, because a significant share of the fossil fuels still being burned
will have to go to building renewable energy capacity.

So now that
“all the major car-makers” have accepted that “the era of the internal
combustion engine is coming to an end,” we’re going to have to give them the
bad news that the era of personal car, however it is powered, is going to have
to come to an end. There will not be enough renewable electricity in America to
satisfy an energy demand at today’s level, let alone the additional burden of
100 million or so electric vehicles. And, no, ride-hailing and autonomous cars
won’t solve the problem.

Winning the race against time requires
political leadership. It means acknowledging that the Chinese model of managed
and directed capitalism might be more appropriate than the Anglo-Saxon model.

Very true
that decision-making can no longer be left to the market, that economic
planning will be essential. But if we look to Chinese capitalism as a practical
strategy, it will indicate that we’re running out of ideas. Chinese government
and business talk a good ecological game, but they also won’t take any action
that might slow economic growth. Go to page 10 of this issue of
CounterPunch for an interview with environmental historian Donald Worster
in which he discusses the current state of China’s “greening” in historical context.

A massive scaling up of investment in
clean technology is needed, because the $300bn
spent on decarbonisation worldwide last year merely matched the cost of the
losses in the US from climate and weather-related events. It also means scaling
up the lending of the World Bank and the regional development banks to help
poorer countries build wind and solar capacity. And a global carbon tax set
high enough so that fossil fuels remain in the ground must be implemented.

A carbon
tax is not even close to a panacea. It would simply be an attempt to reduce
consumption indirectly by making it more costly. The tax would have to be
extremely high if it is to achieve the necessarily steep emissions reduction,
and that would place an insupportable burden on the world’s poor majority.

Even if some
of the revenue from the tax were redistributed, everyone but the rich would
suffer under shortages and inflation, while the rich could afford to maintain
their accustomed lifestyles. The only fair alternative to a carbon tax—rationing—would,
unlike taxes, directly reduce emissions while ensuring sufficiency for all. But
it would have to apply not only to consumers. Production
would have to be rationed, too.

And, more than anything, it means
accepting that the world needs to wage war against climate change. Powerful
vested interests will say there is plenty of time to act, and they are aided by
climate-change deniers who say there is nothing to worry about. These people
need to be called out. They are not deniers, they are climate-change appeasers.
And they are just as dangerously misguided as fascism’s appeasers in the 1930s.

Some climate
activists as well have been advocating a climate “war”. (Bill McKibben went so
far as to write that we must “literally
declare war” on climate change.) What they, and presumably Elliott, mean by
“war” is that we should launch a renewable-energy buildup analogous to the
rapid development of war production capacity in the 1940s. They tend to skip
over the more
important features of the World-War-II-era economies in the United States,
the United Kingdom, and other countries: central planning of production and
rationing of many essential goods.

Note how in
Elliott’s formulation, the war-on-climate-change metaphor allows us to single
out as climate-change appeasers a narrow slice of the capitalist world: the
coal and petroleum interests and their abettors. Then we can imagine that once
those Hydes and Chamberlains are taken down, the rest of the business world can
get on with saving the Earth.

But while
you’re waiting for that to happen, don’t hold your CO2.

Stan Cox is
on the editorial board of Green Social Thought He is the author of Any Way You
Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing and co-author, with Paul
Cox, of How the World Breaks: Life
in Catastrophe’s Path, From the Caribbean to Siberia.

Sunday, 19 August 2018

Editors note: This is relevant for UK
readers, as some years ago, Nick Griffin, then leader of the British National
Party, spoke about the opportunities climate change would bring in terms of challenging immigration for the far right.

Last
September, as record-breaking hurricanes thrashed the Caribbean and south-eastern
U.S., the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance (AmRen) asked
its readers a question: “What does it mean for whites if climate change is
real?”

In its
bombastic response, the magazine bucked two decades of conservative dogma to
offer an ethno-nationalist take on planetary warming. Conceding that scientists
might be right about climate change, it worried that shifting weather patterns
could drive more black and brown people to the Global North, where whites will
face a choice: stem the migrant tide, or die.

“The
population explosion in the global south combined with climate change and
liberal attitudes toward migration are the single greatest external threat to
Western civilization,” AmRen wrote. “[It’s] more serious than Islamic terrorism
or Hispanic illegal immigration.”

The
magazine’s editor-in-chief, influential white nationalist Jared Taylor, doubled
down on AmRen’s position in an email to Jewish Currents. “If continued global
change makes the poor, non-white parts of the world even more unpleasant to live
in than they are now, it will certainly drive more non-whites north,” Taylor
said. “I make no apology for… urging white nations to muster the will to guard
their borders and maintain white majorities.”

From Fringe Views to the White House

These are fringe
views. But they’re becoming less so. Hyper-conservative immigration policies
have drifted from the populist periphery to the White House in a few short
years, and conservatives, from racist reactionaries to Rockefeller Republicans,
are starting to talk openly about how planetary warming might affect their
agendas. In a world where doubting climate science remains something of an 11th
commandment for the American right, this shift is significant. Climate change
gets a little harder to deny every day, and it’s only a matter of time before
mainstream conservatives are forced, by a growing incongruence between their
words and the weather, to abandon hard-core denialism.

Right now, a
handful of Congressional Republicans, some libertarian think tanks, and a few
on the alt-right are the only ones on the right taking climate change
seriously, giving them a head start in shaping conservative climate policy in
the coming decades.

Liberal
lawmakers, meanwhile, seem ill-prepared to go toe-to-toe with conservatives on
climate policy. For two decades, denialism has been climate enemy number one.
The Democrats’ strategy has mostly involved trying to convince people that
planetary warming is real, pillorying deniers as fools, cynics, and oil company
shills.

Perhaps this made sense in the mid-2000s, when “merchants of doubt”
were seeding skepticism about climate science to protect fossil fuel interests
and stave off liberal reforms. It probably still makes sense as part of a
broader climate agenda on the left. After all, it’s a huge problem when top
lawmakers refuse to acknowledge the existence of the potentially
civilization-ending catastrophe sweeping across the planet.

But it’s not
the only problem, and a singular focus on combating denialism has left
Democrats and their liberal backers unprepared to do battle with a conservative
movement armed with real and dangerous policy proposals on climate change.

The Far-Right

The alt-right
is a contested category, and groups typically arrayed under its banner –
fascists, white nationalists, right-wing populists, etc. – lack a unified
position on climate change: its existence, causes, and effects. Some
self-described members of the alt-right accept that industrial capitalism is
largely responsible for spiking greenhouse gas emissions. Others blame growing
populations in the Global South for rising global emissions, even though there’s
little evidence to support this view. Others still continue to question the
science of climate change, or downplay its significance.

What far-right
climate realists seem to agree on is this: rising global temperatures and
changing regional weather patterns threaten to release a flood of migrants from
increasingly inhospitable parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to the
U.S. and Europe, causing what AmRen describes as a “climate-driven demographic
catastrophe.”

“If you
believe in global warming, the obvious implications are that global migration
must be shut down,” one commenter recently posted
on a Reddit forum devoted to discussing the alt-right’s position on climate
change. “All the quickly growing populations must be quarantined or
‘encouraged’ to stop having children.”

Taylor put it
(only a little) more delicately. “If human activity causes undesirable climate
change, we should not promote global population growth,” he told Jewish
Currents, arguing that lawmakers should “promote intensive family planning in
the south, especially in Africa, because an exploding African population will…
drive more Africans north in search of a better life.”

Nothing
scares ethno-nationalists more than “demographic change” – the probability
that, in a few decades, more Americans will be black and brown than white.
They hyperbolize this shift as “white genocide” (a term with a bloody
history), and lament what they see as the loss of white structural power.
It’s not surprising, then, that climate change – which indeed affects the poor,
marginalized, and dispossessed more severely than most white Americans –
inspires racists to fear white decline, and to seek control over the bodies and
movements of non-white people.

Actual Climate Change

Climate
change is here, and it’s bad. Fossil fuel emissions hit an all-time
high last year, which is unfortunate because countless studies have shown
that burning fossil fuels spews heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere,
causing average global temperatures to rise. Indeed, average temperatures have
already jumped about one
degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and we’re on
track to exceed 1.5 degrees of warming by 2040, according to a leaked
report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Among
conservatives, climate realism is still a minority view. Republicans are
largely deniers, doubters, or cynical backers of the fossil fuel industry. Only
28 per cent of white Christians, who overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2016,
believe in anthropogenic warming, according to a Pew
Research Center poll. Trump himself, who once called climate change a
“hoax,” not only continues
to deny the existence of global warming, but has also pulled the U.S. out
of the Paris Climate Agreement, opened
huge tracts of ocean to oil and gas exploration, and stuffed his
administration with climate deniers and champions of the fossil fuel industry.

Doubting
climate change remains a constitutive part of right-wing identity, like
pandering to the gun lobby or opposing abortion rights. It telegraphs distrust
of the “administrative state” – scientists, bureaucrats and “liberal elites”
who tell people what cars to drive and how much soda to drink – and
preemptively opposes decarbonization policies that would threaten fossil fuel
and related industries, which conservative lawmakers often rely on for campaign
contributions.

Indeed, the billionaire donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, known
for bankrolling the Trump campaign and sinking millions into Breitbart and
other far-right websites, continue to finance
climate denial. Maybe this makes business sense: as political theorist and
activist Naomi Klein has observed, cutting carbon emissions enough to keep
planetary warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius (the more ambitious goal set by the
Paris Climate Agreement) would probably require abandoning neoliberal
capitalism. This is not something Republicans are likely to do.

But climate
change is now, like gravity, indisputable. The most pragmatic conservative
institutions, like the Defence Department,
have long accepted the reality of climate change, appreciated its seriousness,
and begun preparing.

Capital, too, understands there’s more money to be made
planning for climate change than ignoring it. Insurance companies are “adapting
in order to profit from climate risk,” according to a 2017 Harvard
Business Review analysis, for instance, by charging more to insure houses
located in low-lying areas vulnerable to sea-level rise. Tellingly, Exxon Mobil
Corp., which conducted some of the earliest
studies on the greenhouse effect, has publicly backed the Paris Agreement
and called for a carbon tax.

Some
Republican lawmakers are starting to flip, too. Congressional Republicans are
stacking the House Climate
Solutions Caucus (though critics say they’re just “greenwashing” their
resumes ahead of the midterms), and The
Atlantic reported last year that a group of Republican House members led by
Congressman Bob Inglis is promoting free-market responses to greenhouse gas
emissions. Republican Congressman Carlos Curbelo, who represents a South
Florida district that could see sea levels rise between 10
and 30 feet by the century’s close, unveiled a carbon tax bill
in July.

These members of the “eco-right” argue, contrary to Klein’s
hypothesis, that tackling climate change is perfectly compatible with
capitalism. They support scrapping emissions regulations in favor of a carbon
pricing system – an idea that’s popular with some libertarian groups, like the Niskanen
Center.

If denialism
is on the way out, can the alt-right influence the nascent conservative climate
agenda? It certainly seems possible. Right-wing populists like Stephen Miller
and Steve
Bannon, who rub
right up against the ethno-nationalist fringes, have had incredible success
smuggling nativist immigration policies from the vanishing edges of
conservatism to the Oval Office.

Xenophobic populism has taken even
firmer hold in Europe, where populist governments and vigilantes have met growing
numbers of migrants from Africa and the Middle East with tightened
immigration controls, harassment and death.
If their influence persists, it does not require a great imaginative effort to
picture far-right views on climate change leaching into the federal climate
agenda.

While the
Trump administration has been transforming its “America First” immigration
platform from white populist pipe dream to federal policy, shameless racists
have been winning airtime and influence. Ethno-nationalist influence on the
Trump White House is contested, and of course not all Trump supporters are
out-and-out white nationalists. But the two groups overlap on immigration, and
Trump’s own rhetoric is often a brackish mixture of dog-whistle nativism and
more overt forms of racist hate (Trump once retweeted
an account called “white genocide,” for example).

It seems
plausible, then, that ethno-nationalist climate proposals could go mainstream.
While the Congressional “eco-right” is taking on mitigation, pushing for a
free-market approach to emissions cuts, alt-right thinkers are some of the only
right-wing voices discussing the ways America will adapt to a changing climate.
And they’re doing so by framing climate change as an immigration issue, a
strategy that’s likely to play well with Trump and his base.

The latter
point is crucial. Immigration and climate change were once seen by
conservatives as something like conceptual opposites. The idea was that
fretting about rising temperatures was either a liberal conspiracy to swell the
size of government or pointless hand-wringing by tree-hugging snowflakes, a
distraction that obscured truly pressing threats like illegal immigration and
Islamic terrorism.

Summing up conservative priorities in 2015, Mike Huckabee
declared that “a beheading is a far greater threat to an American than a
sunburn.” But if conservatives start to believe (wrongly, obviously) that
sunburns will lead to more beheadings – or more immigrants taking American jobs
– it’s not hard to imagine the right not only ditching denialism, but also
using the fact of climate change to whip up support for more draconian
immigration measures.

The populist
right, in the U.S. and elsewhere, seems primed to accept this kind of thinking.
The migrant crisis in Europe, sparked by conflicts in the Middle East and
Northern Africa (conflicts rooted in histories of European colonialism,
extractive capitalism, and Western military intervention), has been met with a
vicious and sometimes deadly xenophobic backlash. There have been good faith efforts
to link the Syrian war to climate change. But it’s easy to picture this work
getting co-opted by nationalists looking for excuses to halt immigration.

Similarly, North Africa from Morocco to Nigeria has been called an “arc
of tension” – a band of earth so battered by drought, famine,
desertification, internal conflict, and centuries of colonial and
neo-imperialist violence that it’s ready to snap, pushing more people north. I
doubt it would take much for climatic shifts in North Africa, a region already
seen as dangerously other and tarred by the right as a terrorist “breeding
ground,” to serve as pretexts for far-right efforts to close borders and
boot migrants seeking shelter from the global storm.

The Left and Climate Realists

The liberal
left isn’t prepared for any of this. Emphasizing climate denial has,
paradoxically, been a way to depoliticize climate change, framing it as an
empirical problem instead of a contest over competing visions of the future.
But the odd fantasy, widespread among the #resistance, that getting everyone to
acknowledge the existence of climate change would also get them to support the
right kinds of climate action has always been just that: fantasy. It reflects a
stubborn faith in both the wisdom of technocrats and the tired liberal belief
that knowing better leads to doing better.

It rarely
does.

The left,
from liberals to Leninists, now have an opportunity to look past deniers and
skeptics, and study the ideas and actions of climate realists across the
conservative spectrum. Some are doing this, of course. Several scholars have
flagged “eco-apartheid”
as a likely consequence of climate change in a staggeringly unequal world.
Naomi Klein, though understandably concerned about climate denial, has argued
that capital is agnostic about rhetoric so long as it can turn socio-environmental
crises to its advantage. And the climate justice movement, powerfully
articulated by activists and intellectuals from Bangladesh to Standing Rock,
has emphasized the unevenness of climate impacts and the need to prepare
equitable responses to their many horrors.

Progressive
cities, states and environmental organizations are basically ignoring
conservatives and pushing aggressive mitigation and adaptation measures, while
eco-socialist thinkers like Kate
Aronoff and John
Bellamy Foster are suggesting ways of folding climate action into broader
efforts to redistribute wealth and re-democratize the political system. If
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the only
American politicians to back plans to keep warming under 1.5 degrees, wins
a Congressional seat in November (which she is almost guaranteed to do),
proposals for ambitious and equitable climate policy will head to Congress.

In five short
years, right-wing populists have marched hardline immigration policies from the
periphery of mainstream U.S. conservatism to the Oval Office. Now they’re
talking about climate change. If their influence persists, it is not hard to
picture rank xenophobia – in the form of stricter immigration quotas, more
militarized borders, and tighter restrictions on women’s fertility – taking
over the federal climate agenda. The results would be nightmarish. If the left
thinks a just response to climate change is still possible, it should take
notice of these nativist believers, and prepare to push back.

Casey
Williams is a writer based in Durham, North Carolina. His work covers
environmental politics and culture, and has appeared in The New York Times,
HuffPost, The Nation, and other national and local outlets.

Thursday, 16 August 2018

It is more
than two years now since the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European
Union (EU), where of course we voted to leave. It has been a feature, during
the referendum campaign itself and in the period since, that those who
advocated Brexit haven’t come up with any sort of plan for life outside of the
union. What kind of relationship with the EU do they want, if any at all?

Lofty talk
of global trade deals and vague sloganising like ‘take back control’ have been
the order of the day, but no specifics have been put forward by the loudest
cheerleaders for Brexit in the Tory party. At long last, the penny seems to
have dropped with these people, that it might be a good idea to have one. However,
this plan looks to be purely cosmetic.

I suspect
that this has been forced on the Brexiteers for two main reasons. Firstly, they
don’t like the prime minister’s Chequers plan, as they see it as not really
leaving the EU. Secondly, public opinion in Britain seems to be shifting to
favour either a ‘soft’ Brexit or another
referendum on the final agreement between the UK and EU, which could well result
in a vote to remain in the EU.

Whatever
the motivation, the Sun
reports that the European Research Group (ERG) of Tory MPs are to ‘ambush’
Theresa May with a plan for a ‘clean Brexit’ just days before the Tory
conference in September. A source told the paper: "This is about
delivering the clean Brexit that people voted for. No concessions."

The plan is
for the UK to have a Canada-style free trade agreement with the EU. But get
this, only if the EU drops its objections to having a border on the island of
Ireland. If the EU will not agree to this there will be no deal at tall, and
the UK will trade on World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms, with the bloc.

Canada and
the EU have signed the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which
is essentially a free trade agreement, removing most tariffs on trade in goods between
the two trading partners and some more limited access for services. Border
controls are still in place for people and goods, so if the UK were to adopt
such an agreement, it would not solve the problems of delays with imports at UK
and exports at EU ports or the situation with the border in Ireland.

I think the
plan is hypothetical anyway, because I can’t see any way that the EU will back
down on the Irish border issue. We could have a CETA type deal otherwise, but
the ERG have ruled this out for some reason. So, we are basically back to a no
deal Brexit, and falling back on WTO trade rules. Hardly much of a plan?

I don’t think
any country in the world trades on WTO rules only, but of course in the longer
run trade deals can be negotiated, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership which the
government has explored joining or bi-lateral trade arrangements with other
nations. All of which takes time and skilled trade deal negotiators though, neither
of which we have much of.

Under WTO
rules, each member must grant the same ‘most favoured nation’ market access, to
all other WTO members. This means that exports to the EU would be subject to
the same customs checks, tariffs and regulatory barriers that the UK and EU
currently charge on trade with countries such as the US. The UK’s exports to
the EU and other WTO members would also be subject to the importing countries’
most favoured nation tariffs. But tariffs all the same.

EU tariffs on
WTO goods range from zero to 45%, with the average tariff being 4.8%, making
British goods under such arrangements, less competitive in the EU marketplace.
Of course, costs could be reduced by UK exporters, to cover the difference, but
this will almost certainly mean cutting the wages of British workers.
Alternately, businesses may relocate to the EU, where it is feasible and
advantageous, taking British jobs with them.

The
Alt-Brexit plan turns out to be really no plan at all, with even a Canada style
deal out of the question if there is no agreement on keeping the Irish border
open. It is just a long winded way of crashing out of the EU with no deal
whatsoever, with all of the problems that will bring for the UK. And more time
wasted on pointless negotiations.

Tuesday, 14 August 2018

The government is planning its next change to local
government funding in England, with the intention of further reducing the Revenue Support
Grant (RSG) and increasing the amount of local business rates that are retained
locally to 75% (currently 50%). The RSG is the amount of money that central
government gives to local authorities, based on a formula that sees different
areas getting different amounts of money, depending on social indicators, things
like population, deprivation and so forth.

The aim in the longer term for this government is to abolish
the RSG altogether and have 100% of business rates retained where they are
collected, but it is debatable whether this is ever likely to happen. The
problem is that business rates, although fairly constant, in a recession would
impact on local finances directly, as well as more generally. But in any case,
the immediate problem now is how to compensate councils for what is called
‘negative RSG.’ This means council’s that will get less money after the
changes.

Something I think will need to be put in place to even
out regional differences, but perhaps called something else? Given the choppy
Brexit waters we sail in, this could become a big problem, especially in places
that might fare worse than others. In the interim of 75% locally retained
business rates, the sharing out plan looks to favour Tory governed areas, over those
run by other parties.

Analysis by the Local Government Chronicle (LGC) (subscription),
shows that the preferred new system will see the lion’s share of compensation payments
going to rural councils, which are predominantly Tory run.

Negative RSG
compensation beneficiaries by political party

Political party Total due

Conservative £129.8m

Labour£2.9m

Liberal Democrat£12.8m

No overall control£7m

The 10
councils which will receive most negative RSG compensation 2019-20

Surrey£17.3mConservative

Buckinghamshire £10.9mConservative

Dorset£10.1mConservative

Richmond upon Thames £7.5m Liberal Democrat

Cambridgeshire£7.2mConservative

Wokingham£7.1mConservative

Oxfordshire£6.2mConservative

North Yorkshire £3.7mConservative

West Berkshire£3.5m Conservative

Cheshire East£2.6m Conservative

As you can see, 9 of the top 10 gaining councils under
the preferred compensation scheme are Tory.

Concerns about the way negative RSG is being dealt
with comes two years after the government’s transition grant controversially
distributed £300m funding mostly among Conservative-led councils. Surrey was
also the biggest winner under that scheme which sought to smooth the path for
councils facing the steepest cuts to revenue support grant, and address
concerns about delivering services in rural areas. It followed threats from
Tory MPs to vote down the whole local government finance settlement.

Nottingham City Council will see RSG cut by £10m to
£25m next year but does not qualify to receive any compensation funding. Deputy
leader Graham Chapman (Lab) told LGC: “[The ministry’s proposal for dealing
with negative RSG] is a scandalous abuse of public money under the guise of
objectivity.”

In its technical consultation the Ministry for
Housing, Communities and Local Government said it had “explored a number of
possible options for addressing” negative RSG and found using some of the
government’s share of business rates income to compensate affected councils
“represents the most direct and simple solution to the problem.”

Cllr Chapman said it was “frankly outrageous that the
government is once again choosing to bail out councils in better-off areas”,
largely in the south, “when poorer councils in the North and Midlands, in areas
with higher need, are losing out”.

This comes on top savage cuts to local government
grants for the last eight years, which has led to Northamptonshire County
Council becoming insolvent and preparing to cut all but statutory services. Other
council’s are said to be struggling too, but the government will not change
course from the austerity induced cuts to local services.

Sir Stephen Houghton (Lab), chair of the Special
Interest Group of Municipal Authorities, told LGC: “If government are now
minded to put additional funding into local government that should be a cause
for celebration but when this is done for the benefit of the wealthy few,
rather than being allocated where funding is most needed, it brings the whole
system into disrepute.”

The government says its plan is the fairest and
easiest way to address the result of negative RSG compensation. The technical
consultation on changes to local government finance can be found here.

Sunday, 12 August 2018

Written by
Naomi Klein – an abridged version first published at The
Intercept

The entire
August 5 New York Times Magazine was composed of just one article on a single
subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time
when the science was settled and the politics seemed to align. The
novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate
crisis has long deserved but almost never received.

Written by
Nathaniel Rich, this work of history is filled with insider revelations about
roads not taken that, on several occasions, made me swear out loud.

And lest
there be any doubt that the implications of these decisions will be etched in
geologic time, Rich’s words are punctuated with full-page aerial photographs by
George Steinmetz that wrenchingly document the rapid unravelling of planetary
systems. These range from the rushing water where Greenland ice used to be to
huge algae blooms in China’s third largest-lake.

We have all
heard the various excuses for why the small matter of despoiling our only home
just doesn’t cut it as an urgent news story: “Climate change is too far off in
the future”; “It’s inappropriate to talk about politics when people are losing
their lives to hurricanes and fires”; “Journalists follow the news, they don’t
make it — and politicians aren’t talking about climate change”; and of course:
“Every time we try, it’s a ratings killer.”

None of the
excuses can mask the dereliction of duty. It has always been possible for major
media outlets to decide that planetary destabilisation is a huge news story,
very likely the most consequential of our time. They always had the capacity to
harness the skills of their reporters and photographers to connect abstract
science to lived extreme weather events.

And if they
did so consistently, it would lessen the need for journalists to get ahead of
politics because the more informed the public is about both the threat and the
tangible solutions, the more they push their elected representatives to take
bold action.

Which is why
it was so exciting to see the NYT throw the full force of its editorial machine
behind Rich’s opus — teasing it with a promotional
video, kicking it off with a live event at the Times Centre, and
accompanying educational
materials.

That’s also
why it is so enraging that the piece is spectacularly wrong in its central
thesis.

Getting it wrong

According to
Rich, between 1979 and 1989, the basic science of climate change was understood
and accepted, the partisan divide over the issue had yet to cleave, the fossil
fuel companies hadn’t started their misinformation campaign in earnest, and
there was a great deal of global political momentum toward a bold and binding
international emissions-reduction agreement.

Writing of
the key period at the end of the 1980s, Rich says: “The conditions for success
could not have been more favourable.”

And yet we
blew it — “we” being humans, who apparently are just too short-sighted to
safeguard our future. Just in case we missed the point of who and what is to
blame for the fact that we are now “losing Earth”, Rich’s answer is presented
in a full-page callout: “All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our
way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.”

Yep, you and
me. Not, according to Rich, the fossil fuel companies who sat in on every major
policy meeting described in the piece.

Imagine
tobacco executives being repeatedly invited by the US government to come up
with policies to ban smoking. When those meetings failed to yield anything
substantive, would we conclude that the reason is that humans just want to die?
Might we perhaps determine instead that the political system is corrupt and
busted?

This misreading
has been pointed out by many climate scientists and historians since the
online version of the piece dropped on August 1. Others have remarked on the
maddening invocations of “human nature” and the use of the royal “we” to
describe a screamingly homogenous group of US power players.

Throughout Rich’s
accounting, we hear nothing from those political leaders in the Global South
who were demanding binding action in this key period and after, somehow able to
care about future generations despite being human.

The voices of
women, meanwhile, are almost as rare in Rich’s text as sightings of the
endangered ivory-billed woodpecker — and when we ladies do appear, it is mainly
as long-suffering wives of tragically heroic men.

My focus is
the central premise of the piece: that the end of the 1980s presented
conditions that “could not have been more favourable” to bold climate action.
On the contrary, one could scarcely imagine a more inopportune moment in human
evolution for our species to come face to face with the hard truth that the
conveniences of modern consumer capitalism were steadily eroding the
habitability of the planet.

The late ’80s
was the absolute zenith of the neoliberal crusade, a moment of peak ideological
ascendency for the economic and social project that deliberately set out to
vilify collective action in the name of liberating “free markets” in every
aspect of life. Yet Rich makes no mention of this parallel upheaval in economic
and political thought.

Real discussion

When I delved
into this same climate change history some years ago, I concluded, as Rich
does, that the key juncture when world momentum was building toward a tough,
science-based global agreement was 1988. That was when James Hansen, then
director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before
Congress that he had “99% confidence” in “a real warming trend” linked to human
activity.

Later that
same month, hundreds of scientists and policymakers held the historic World
Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in Toronto, where the first emission
reduction targets were discussed. By the end of that year, the United Nations’
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the premier scientific body advising
governments on the climate threat, held its first session.

But climate
change wasn’t just a concern for politicians and wonks — it was watercooler
stuff, so much so that when the editors of Time magazine announced their 1988
“Man of the Year,” they went for “Planet of the Year: Endangered Earth”. The
cover featured an image of the globe held together with twine, the sun setting
ominously in the background.

“No single
individual, no event, no movement captured imaginations or dominated headlines
more,” journalist Thomas Sancton explained, “than the clump of rock and soil
and water and air that is our common home.”

When I surveyed
the climate news from this period, it really did seem like a profound shift was
within grasp. Then, tragically, it all slipped away. The US walked out of
international negotiations and the rest of the world settled for non-binding
agreements that relied on dodgy “market mechanisms” like carbon trading and
offsets.

So it really
is worth asking, as Rich does: What the hell happened? What interrupted the
urgency and determination that was emanating from all these elite
establishments simultaneously by the end of the ’80s?

Rich
concludes, while offering no social or scientific evidence, that something
called “human nature” kicked in and messed everything up.

“Human
beings,” he writes, “whether in global organizations, democracies, industries,
political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present
convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations.”

Neoliberal revolution

When I looked
at the same period, I came to a very different conclusion: that what at first
seemed like our best shot at lifesaving climate action had in retrospect
suffered from an epic case of historical bad timing.

Because what
becomes clear when you look back at this juncture is that just as governments
were talking about getting serious about reining in the fossil fuel sector, the
global neoliberal revolution went supernova. That project of economic and
social reengineering clashed with the imperatives of both climate science and
corporate regulation at every turn.

The failure
to make even a passing reference to this other global trend that was unfolding
in the late ’80s represents an unfathomably large blind spot in Rich’s piece.
After all, the primary benefit of returning to a period in the not-too-distant
past as a journalist is that you are able to see trends and patterns that were
not yet visible to people living through those tumultuous events in real time.

One thing
that becomes very clear when you look back on the late ’80s is that, far from
offering “conditions for success [that] could not have been more favorable,”
1988-89 was the worst possible moment for humanity to decide that it was going
to get serious about putting planetary health ahead of profits.

Recall what
else was going on. In 1988, Canada and the US signed their free trade
agreement, a prototype for countless pro-corporate deals that would follow. The
Berlin Wall was about to fall, an event that would be successfully seized upon
by right-wing ideologues in the US as proof of “the end of history” and taken
as license to export the Reagan-Thatcher recipe of privatisation, deregulation,
and austerity to every corner of the globe.

It was this
convergence of historical trends — the emergence of a global architecture that
was supposed to tackle climate change and the emergence of a much more powerful
global architecture to liberate capital from all constraints — that derailed
the momentum Rich rightly identifies.

Because, as
he notes repeatedly, meeting the challenge of climate change would have
required imposing stiff regulations on polluters while investing in the public
sphere to transform how we power our lives, live in cities, and move ourselves
around.

All of this
was, and is, possible. But it demands a head-on battle with the project of
neoliberalism. Meanwhile, the “free trade” deals being signed in this period
were busily making many sensible climate initiatives — like subsidising and
offering preferential treatment to local green industry and refusing many
polluting projects like fracking and oil pipelines — illegal under
international trade law.

Capitalism

I wrote a
500-page book about this collision between capitalism and the planet. I’ll
quote a short passage here:

“We have not
done the things that are needed to lower emissions because those things
fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism.

“We are stuck
because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe
— and would benefit the vast majority — are extremely threatening to an elite
minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and
most of our major media outlets;

“It is our
great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive
diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were
enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at
any point since the 1920s.

Why does it
matter that Rich makes no mention of this clash and instead, claims our fate
has been sealed by “human nature”? It matters because if the force that
interrupted the momentum toward action is “ourselves”, then the fatalistic
headline on the cover of New York Times Magazine – “Losing Earth” — really is
merited. If an inability to sacrifice in the short term for a shot at health
and safety in the future is baked into our collective DNA, then we have no hope
of turning things around in time to avert truly catastrophic warming.

If, on the
other hand, we humans really were on the brink of saving ourselves in the ’80s,
but were swamped by a tide of elite, free-market fanaticism — one opposed by
millions of people around the world — then there is something quite concrete we
can do about it.

We can
confront that economic order and try to replace it with something that is
rooted in both human and planetary security, one that does not place the quest
for growth and profit at all costs at its centre.

The good news

And the good
news — and, yes, there is some — is that today, unlike in 1989, a young and
growing movement of green democratic socialists is advancing in the United
States with precisely that vision. And that represents more than just an
electoral alternative — it’s our one and only planetary lifeline.

Yet we have
to be clear that the lifeline we need is not something that has been tried
before, at least not at anything like the scale required. When the NYT tweeted out its
teaser for Rich’s article about “humankind’s inability to address the
climate change catastrophe,” the eco-justice wing of the Democratic Socialists
of America quickly offered this
correction: “*CAPITALISM* If they were serious about investigating what’s
gone so wrong, this would be about ‘capitalism’s inability to address the
climate change catastrophe.’ Beyond capitalism, *humankind* is fully capable of
organizing societies to thrive within ecological limits.”

Their point
is a good one, if incomplete. There is nothing essential about humans living
under capitalism; we humans are capable of organising ourselves into all kinds
of different social orders, including societies with much longer time horizons
and far more respect for natural life-support systems.

Indeed,
humans have lived that way for the vast majority of our history and many
Indigenous cultures keep Earth-centred cosmologies alive to this day.
Capitalism is a tiny blip in the collective story of our species.

But simply
blaming capitalism isn’t enough. It is absolutely true that the drive for
endless growth and profits stands squarely opposed to the imperative for a
rapid transition from fossil fuels.

It is
absolutely true that the global unleashing of the unbound form of capitalism
known as neoliberalism in the ’80s and ’90s has been the single greatest
contributor to a disastrous global emission spike in recent decades, as well as
the single greatest obstacle to science-based climate action ever since
governments began meeting to talk (and talk and talk) about lowering emissions.
And it remains the biggest obstacle today, even in countries that market
themselves as climate leaders, like Canada and France.

But we have
to be honest that autocratic industrial socialism has also been a disaster for
the environment, as evidenced most dramatically by the fact that carbon
emissions briefly plummeted when the economies of the former Soviet Union
collapsed in the early 1990s.

We can
conclude that socialism isn’t necessarily ecological, but that a new form of
democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings
about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of all of life,
appears to be humanity’s best shot at collective survival.

We aren’t
losing Earth — but the Earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a
trajectory to lose a great many of us. In the nick of time, a new political
path to safety is presenting itself. This is no moment to bemoan our lost
decades. It’s the moment to get the hell on that path.